Agents from Venezuela’s military intelligence agency on Thursday arrested Guillermo Zuloaga, the owner of the independent television network Globovisión and one of the country’s most influential critics of President Hugo Chávez, heightening concerns over an intensifying clampdown on news organizations and opposition political leaders.

Mr. Zuloaga was released several hours later and told not to leave the country while the investigation continued. International human rights groups and the Organization of American States had pressed the government to release him.

Attorney General Luisa Ortega said that Mr. Zuloaga had been arrested in connection with comments he made this month at an Inter American Press Association meeting in Aruba that were considered false and “offensive” to Mr. Chávez. Among other remarks at the meeting, Mr. Zuloaga pointedly criticized methods used by Mr. Chávez’s government to shut down news outlets, and was quoted as saying it meant the country lacked freedom of expression.

The arrest of Mr. Zuloaga comes at a time when Mr. Chávez’s government is adopting an increasingly harsh approach to dealing with the president’s critics. Mr. Chávez, who is facing broad public ire over continuing electricity blackouts and a sharply contracting economy, recently pushed another critical television network, RCTV, off the airwaves.

Michael O’Hanlon, who tracks indicators of progress for the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index, said that “Iraq has continued its remarkable trajectory of improvement.’’

“It is still fairly violent by Mideast standards, but many countries in places like South America have higher overall levels of violence now from crime,’’ he said.

Traditional Wall Street investors have taken note. Iraq is now considered a safer bet than Argentina, Venezuela, Pakistan, and Dubai — and is nearly on par with the State of California, according to Bloomberg statistics on credit default swaps, which are considered a raw indicator of default risk.

“Compared to California, I’d rather bet on Iraq,’’ Daher said. “Iraq is a country where there are still bombs going off and people getting murdered, but they are less indebted than the United States. California is likely to have more demands on its resources, and there is no miracle where California is going to have more revenue coming out of the sky. Iraq has prospects for tremendously higher revenues, if they can manage to get their act halfway together, which they seem to be doing.’’

Eating less meat will not reduce global warming, and reports that claim it will are distracting society from finding real ways to beat climate change, a leading air quality expert said on Monday.

« We certainly can reduce our greenhouse gas production, but not by consuming less meat and milk, » Frank Mitloehner, an air quality expert at the University of California-Davis, said as he presented a report on meat-eating and climate change at a conference of the American Chemical Society in California.

Blaming cows and pigs for climate change is scientifically inaccurate, said Mr. Mitloehner, dismissing several reports, including one issued in 2006 by the United Nations, which he said overstate the role that livestock play in global warming.

The notion that eating less meat will help to combat climate change has spawned campaigns for « meatless Mondays » and a European campaign launched late last year, called « Less Meat Less Heat. »

« Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries. » Developing countries « should adopt more efficient, Western-style farming practices, to make more food with less greenhouse gas production, » Mr. Mitloehner added.

The differences between the neighbors are indeed significant. Life expectancy at birth is 2.6 years greater for Canadian men than for American men, and 2.3 years greater for Canadian women than American women.

These facts are often taken as evidence for the inadequacy of the American health system. But a recent study by June and Dave O’Neill, economists at Baruch College, from which these numbers come, shows that the difference in health outcomes has more to do with broader social forces.

For example, Americans are more likely than Canadians to die by accident or by homicide. For men in their 20s, mortality rates are more than 50 percent higher in the United States than in Canada, but the O’Neills show that accidents and homicides account for most of that gap. Maybe these differences have lessons for traffic laws and gun control, but they teach us nothing about our system of health care.

Americans are also more likely to be obese, leading to heart disease and other medical problems. Among Americans, 31 percent of men and 33 percent of women have a body mass index of at least 30, a definition of obesity, versus 17 percent of men and 19 percent of women in Canada. Japan, which has the longest life expectancy among major nations, has obesity rates of about 3 percent.

The causes of American obesity are not fully understood, but they involve lifestyle choices we make every day, as well as our system of food delivery. Research by the Harvard economists David Cutler, Ed Glaeser and Jesse Shapiro concludes that America’s growing obesity problem is largely attributable to our economy’s ability to supply high-calorie foods cheaply. Lower prices increase food consumption, sometimes beyond the point of optimal health.

Life expectancy in the United States fares poorly in international comparisons, primarily because of high mortality rates above age 50. Its low ranking is often blamed on a poor performance by the health care system rather than on behavioral or social factors. This paper presents evidence on the relative performance of the US health care system using death avoidance as the sole criterion. We find that, by standards of OECD countries, the US does well in terms of screening for cancer, survival rates from cancer, survival rates after heart attacks and strokes, and medication of individuals with high levels of blood pressure or cholesterol. We consider in greater depth mortality from prostate cancer and breast cancer, diseases for which effective methods of identification and treatment have been developed and where behavioral factors do not play a dominant role. We show that the US has had significantly faster declines in mortality from these two diseases than comparison countries. We conclude that the low longevity ranking of the United States is not likely to be a result of a poorly functioning health care system.

Infant mortality in the United States is 6.8 per 1,000 live births, versus 5.3 in Canada.

Infant mortality rates reflect broader social trends, including the prevalence of infants with low birth weight. The health system in the United States gives low birth-weight babies slightly better survival chances than does Canada’s, but the more pronounced difference is the frequency of these cases. In the United States, 7.5 percent of babies are born weighing less than 2,500 grams (about 5.5 pounds), compared with 5.7 percent in Canada. In both nations, these infants have more than 10 times the mortality rate of larger babies. Low birth weights are in turn correlated with teenage motherhood. (One theory is that a teenage mother is still growing and thus competing with the fetus for nutrients.) The rate of teenage motherhood, is almost 3 times higher in the United States than it is in Canada.

Whatever its merits, a Canadian-style system of national health insurance is unlikely to change the sexual mores of American youth.

It is commonly supposed that a publicly funded single payer health care system will deliver better health outcomes, and distribute health resources more fairly than a multi-payer system with a large private component.

Health status is similar in both countries. But Canada has no more abolished the tendency for health status to improve with income than have other countries. Indeed, the health-income gradient is more prominent in Canada than it is in the U.S. The need to ration when care is delivered “free” ultimately leads to long waits or unavailable services and to unmet needs. In the U.S. costs are more often a source of unmet needs. But costs may be more easily overcome than the absence of services.

Brett Skinner, author of Health Insurance and Bankruptcy Rates in Canada and the United States and Fraser Institute director of bio-pharma, health and insurance policy research, says the evidence doesn’t support the bankruptcy claim.

“If socialized medicine played a role in reducing personal bankruptcies, we would expect to see a lower rate of personal bankruptcy in Canada compared to the United States. Yet the reverse is true. The personal bankruptcy rate is actually higher in Canada than it is in the U.S.,” he said.

Skinner compared bankruptcy data in the U.S. and Canada from 2006 and 2007, and found that personal (non-business) bankruptcy filings as a percentage of the population were 0.2 per cent in the U.S. during 2006 and 0.27 per cent in 2007. In Canada, the numbers are 0.3 per cent in both 2006 and 2007.

“There is no evidence to support the idea that a government-run health care system in the U.S. will reduce personal bankruptcies,” Skinner said.

Less than 24 hours after the U.S. House of Representatives gave final approval to a sweeping overhaul of health care, attorneys general from several states on Monday said they will sue to block the plan on constitutional grounds.

Republican attorneys general in 11 states warned that lawsuits will be filed to stop the federal government overstepping its constitutional powers and usurping states’ sovereignty.

Ten of the attorneys general plan to band together in a collective lawsuit on behalf of Alabama, Florida, Nebraska, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Washington.

“To protect all Texans’ constitutional rights, preserve the constitutional framework intended by our nation’s founders, and defend our state from further infringement by the federal government, the State of Texas and other states will legally challenge the federal health care legislation,” said Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, in a statement.

In addition to the pending lawsuits, bills and resolutions have been introduced in at least 36 state legislatures seeking to limit or oppose various aspects of the reform plan through laws or state constitutional amendments, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Wall Street financial firms weren’t the only ones giving big bonuses in the boom years before the worst financial crisis in generations. The government also was handing out millions of dollars to bank regulators, rewarding « superior » work even as an avalanche of risky mortgages helped create the meltdown.

Just as bank executives got bonuses despite taking on dangerous amounts of risk, regulators got taxpayer-funded bonuses despite missing or ignoring signs that the system was on the verge of a meltdown.

During the 2003-06 boom, the three agencies that supervise most U.S. banks – the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) – gave out at least $19 million in bonuses, records show.

Nearly all that money was spent recognizing « superior » performance. The largest share, more than $8.4 million, went to financial examiners, those employees and managers who scrutinize internal bank documents and sound the first alarms. Analysts, auditors, economists and criminal investigators also got awards.

Because most bank inspection records are not public and the government blacked out many of the employee names before releasing the bonus data, it’s impossible to determine how many auditors got bonuses despite working on major banks that failed.

« We hard-hearted, small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government. Once a chap’s enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest. He’s got his, and to hell with everyone else. People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense. »